Voynich f36r plant = geranium?

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A few days ago, my wife suggested that the plant depicted on f36r might be a variety of geranium: on a hunch, I thought I’d compare it with the plants in Fuchs’ famous herbal – and Google quite unexpectedly directed me to a museum in Tuscany.

You see, in 2002 the Aboca Museum in Sansepolcro embarked upon an ambitious programme to bring together, to document, and even to publish its own books on the history of herbal medicine in Tuscany. It even has an online virtual tour (in both English and Italian) of its various collections of herbal-/apothecary-related artefacts (such as maiolica, pestles and mortars, books), though I’d recommend broadband. (I can’t stand their background saxophone music, though, sorry!)

For history lovers, they have also put scans of a number of herbals. Here I’m interested in their online browsable copy of Leonhard Fuchs’ Great Herbal (“De historia stirpium”), though only in 72dpi resolution (boo!). Handily, though, this is searchable by keyword: and for “geranium”, you find that Fuchs included drawings of six varieties of geranium (“geranion” in Greek) on plates 204-209. I pasted the images side by side so that I could compare them properly: this is what it looks like (be warned if you click on it, it’s a 3000-pixel-wide image!)


I think that the best match by far is the third plate (plate 206, “Geranium Tertium”, or “Ruprechtskraut”), as this has a similar curious rootball and a hairy lump” (the crane’s bill, I believe!) just beneath each flower. I put this side-by-side along with a picture of the plant on my neighbour’s front step (thanks Alex!) and the Beinecke’s scan of f36r: and now I’m pretty sold on the idea that this is indeed a geranium (thanks Julie!)

There’s another version from the Biblioteca Riccardiana here, and also an uncoloured version of Fuchs’ plate in Yale’s medical library here (on the left).

It is thought that Fuchs’ “Geranium Tertium” corresponds to the “Geranion Eteron” in Book Three (Roots) of Dioscorides. There, Section 3-131 says:-

“Geranium has a jagged leaf similar to anemone but longer; a root somewhat round, sweet when eaten. A teaspoonful of a decoction (taken as a drink in wine) dissolves swellings of the vulva. It has slender little downy stalks two feet long; leaves like mallow; and on the tops of the wings certain abnormal growths looking upward (like the heads of cranes with the beaks, or the teeth of dogs), but there is no use for it in medicine. It is also called pelonitis, trica, or geranogeron, the Romans call it echinaster, the Africans iesce; it is also called alterum geranium by some, but others call it oxyphyllon, mertryx, myrrhis cardamomum, or origanum. The Magi call it hierobryncas, the Romans, pulmonia, some, cicotria, some, herba gruina, and the Africans, ienk.”

What do you think?

David Icke and the Voynich…

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I suppose it was glumly inevitable that the world’s favourite anti-reptilian ex-goalkeeper David Icke would have included the Voynich Manuscript in “The Biggest Secret” (1999), now freely downloadable from scribd.com. Which is nice.

Much as you’d expect, many of the strands of the mainstream story get picked out and respun into a distinctly paranoia-flavoured fabric. For example, “John Dee was the Queen’s astrologer, a Rosicrucian Grand Master, a black magician, and a secret agent for the new intelligence network”: he and Edward Kelley were talking not with angels but “reptilians“. Oh, and Rudolph II was “of the reptilian Habsburg dynasty, another occultist.”

Hmmm: I feel another semantically irregular verb coming on:-

  • I am a visionary, a singularity within a vortex of eternal chaos
  • You (singular) are badly compromised, but might be redeemed if you buy my book
  • He/she is reptilian. Oh, and did I mention he/she is reptilian?
  • We are freedom fighters against the infinite evil of The Brotherhood
  • You (plural) are corrupted by prolonged exposure to reptilian media lies and hype
  • They are part of a reptilian dynasty/network/conspiracy that spans the ages

Once you get the hang of how it works, Icke’s stuff almost writes itself. What is he going to say about the Voynich Manuscript? Easy: just take the most superficial reading you can (Newbold’s snail, etc), reptilify it, and summarize it thus:-

“This manuscript is just one example of the level of knowledge the
Brotherhood were working with hundreds of years ago while their other wing, the
religions, were keeping the masses in the most basic ignorance.”

And now someone has posted on David Icke’s online forum, claiming to be a senior member of the Illuminati (though to me it reads more like a publisher PR hack having a bit of fun at Icke-fandom’s expense):-

“Let me just say to you that we tried twice in the past to show a coded glimpse of the nature of our great secret. You have probably heard of the most mysterious manuscript in the world – the Voynich manuscript. No one has ever been able to decode it. The men who wrote it were members of the Illuminati and they were captured and killed before they could release the key to decoding it. The Arthurian legends were our other main attempt to enter popular consciousness and reveal our true purpose. They succeeded to an extent, but our enemies were able to confuse our message by releasing alternative versions of the legends. So, now we are trying again.”

Yeah, rrrright.

Bizarrely, the title of the (probably as-yet-unfinished) book being puffed (“The Soul Camera”) is the same name as an odd camera that has just been released in Japan by Sonaco, that apparently photographs your “aura” in some way. As always, the world is far stranger than conspiracy theorists think – but in a completely different way.

"Mappamundi" Voynich novel…

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Fans of historical novelist Christopher Harris have a new Voynich Manuscript-themed book of his heading their way in early 2009: to be published by Dedalus Books, “Mappamundi” is a non-Byzantine sequel to the final book in Harris’ Byzantine trilogy, “False Ambassador” (if that’s not too confusing). I asked him how he came to find the Voynich Manuscript:-

“As far as I can remember, I first came across the Voynich MS in an article in New Scientist (17 November 2001). As you would expect, the focus of the article is on cryptography, linguistics, statistical analysis, etc. I was intrigued by the strangeness of the MS, and thought I might be able to use it in a novel. (I have an interest in lost or mysterious manuscripts, e.g Plethon’s ‘Book of Laws’, which features in my ‘False Ambassador’.) I read what I could about the MS, and later got hold of the Gawsewitch facsimile edition (I don’t know if it’s available in the UK. I bought mine from Amazon.fr).”

Aside from the role the VMs takes on Mappamundi, what are his thoughts on what the VMs is or contains?

“Personally, I am inclined to believe the Art Brut theory, which suggests that the MS may be the production of a psychotic outsider who had seen herbal/ alchemical/ esoteric manuscripts, and attempted to replicate them obsessively, but without any understanding of the originals. There are examples of this in the 19th & 20th centuries, and it is quite possible that some 15th century monk, or amateur scholar, was similarly afflicted.

However, it would be a lot more interesting if it turned out to be a coherent document, capable of being translated.”

All of which is fair enough: more on this as it happens…

Egyptian / Arabic link to the VMs…?

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If (like me) you are a bit of a bibliophile, you may quite enjoy a little social web site called LibraryThing, which is based around a community of bibliophiles listing all the books they own (or rather, the ones they’re happy to admit owning). Thanks to a low-tech web interface, adding your own books is a surprisingly quick process (marred only by its apparent inability to handle apostrophes in book titles effectively, *sigh*), and you can add up to 200 for free. So far, I ‘ve added most of my VMs research titles, which you can see on my LibraryThing catalogue.

But it’s then that LibraryThing starts to get interesting, because you can start to see who else there has similar bookshelves, and what they’re reading – and what you haven’t read. There are also user reviews, and various other tricksy book-related things you can do (like adding tags to books).

Which is where I wanted to start: one LibraryThing user called “morgan42” (Morgan Roussel) has a (frankly huge) book collection of all the right kind of stuff, and blogs about it etc. While searching for LibraryThing books tagged with “Voynich”, I noticed that he had applied this tag to a most unusual book..

Morgan had been reading “Egyptology: The Missing Millennium” by Okasha el Daly: this concerns the transmission of Egyptian ideas through Arabic texts over a thousand year period that most accounts simply omit. In the book’s Figure 24, there is a colour reproduction of folio 50a of British Library MS Add 25724 by the 13th-14th century Arab alchemist Abu Al-Qasim Al-‘Iraqi, which itself reproduces (with various alchemical embellishments) “A stela of King Amenemhat II (ca 1928-1895 BCE) of the Twelfth Dynasty”.

A quick web search reveals that Okasha el Daly is a professor at UCL, who revealed to a surprised world in 2004 that various Arabic alchemists were able to read hieroglyphics an entire millennium before Champollion. There’s a decent-sized UCL press release about this over on the ArcheoBlog.

All fascinating stuff: but presumably nothing to do with the Voynich Manuscript, right? Well… Morgan noticed that Al-Qasim’s drawing appears to contain the common Voynichese letter pair “ot”, clear as day. And here it is:-


Note also that the letter one to the right of the “ot” looks not unlike like a “ch” struckthrough gallows, while the letter two to its right looks not like a “4” (EVA “q”). Of course, any Voynich researcher would tell you that these letters would never appear in that order in the actual VMs: but it’s interesting, nonetheless.

So, I thought, let’s have a look at the BL catalogue entry for this ms: rather unhelpfully, it says “For description of No. 25,724, see the Catalogue, of Oriental MSS“. So I emailed the BL, and was told that “descriptions of [the BL’s Oriental MSS] are at present only available in handwritten and printed catalogues kept for consultation on the open access shelves in our Reading Room“. *sigh*

But the BL person also typed in the entry for MS 25,724 to save me the trouble of going on, which was very kind: it is “a volume containing several treatises on alchemy by Abu-l-Ka’sim al-Iraki, Balamaghus [?] al-Maghribi and others, with coloured symbolical drawings and cabbalistic writings. Arabic, 18th century“. Which then raises the question… “18th century”?

In summary: though I don’t honestly think this mysterious lettering is Voynichese, I must admit to being a little intrigued. Might the lettering in a similar 14th century Arabic document (of which this is apparently a copy) have been the specific inspiration for the Voynich’s cipher alphabet?

I asked Okasha el Daly about this phrase: he said that he had “…no clue but they may be corrupted Greek or some other deformed Egyptian scripts. They may well be some of the many alchemical symbols used in these manuscripts.”

A reasonable prediction would therefore be that this is a (possibly 18th century?) scribal corruption of stylized Ancient Greek or deformed Egyptian text – I’d guess Greek, in that the “o” is probably an omicron. But can we possibly reconstruct what that six-letter word originally was? It was located between a curious face and an alchemist at his furnace, with large ravens to the right (not shown below):-

"The Alchemyst"…

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Nosing around in Borders the other day, I noticed a popular teen alchemist-themed book called “The Alchemyst” (2007) by Michael Scott: it had a nice cover, good in-store marketing (early-teen-eye-high positioning, right next to some Philip Pullman books), and featured John Dee and Nicholas Flamel, doing a whole bunch of the-world-is-in-danger demonological things with two children (Josh and Sophie) who begin the story working in Flamel’s bookshop. Of course, the star of the show is arguably The Codex (containing the recipe for the Elixir of Life) that gets stolen and endlessly pursued: but you probably guessed that already. 🙂

And now I read (courtesy of Wikipedia) that there’s a “The Alchemyst” film in pre-production, and the sequel’s already in the shops. Alchemy: there’s a lot of it about, isn’t there, hmmm? 😮

Navigating Voynich Manuscript f1r…

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Seeing the Voynich Manuscript for the first time is quite an intimidating experience: you’re looking at something which is so uncertain in so many different ways – how should you try to “read” it?

In general, when you look at a page of text, you do two different types of reading: (1) you work out how everything is laid out (you navigate the page) and (2) you read what is contained within it (you read the text). In computer science terms, you could describe the layout conventions and text conventions as having two quite separate ‘grammars’.

For instance, if you picked up a Hungarian newspaper, I would predict that you would stand a good chance of being able to work out its structure, even though you may not be able to understand a single word. It’s perfectly reasonable, then, to be able to navigate a page without being able to read it.

What’s not widely known about the Voynich Manuscript is that researchers have identified many of the navigational elements that structure the text (even though they cannot actually read them). I thought it might be helpful to post about these (oh, and I’m getting emails mildly berated me for posting too much about the wrong ‘v’, i.e. that it’s not “Vampire News“).

As a practical example, let’s look at the very first page of the manuscript proper: this has the name “f1r” (which means “the recto [front] side of folio [double-sided page] #1″). You may also see this referred to as “f001r” (some people use this naming style so that their image files get sorted nicely), or even as “1006076.sid” (this is the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s internal database reference for the high-resolution scan of f1r, which they store as a kind of highly compressed image). This is what f1r looks like:-

Note that the green splodges aren’t actually part of the page itself – they’re green leaves painted onto the reverse side of the folio (that is, on f1v, “folio #1 verso [back]“) that happen to be visible through the vellum. I’ll leave the issue of whether this is because the paint is too thick or the vellum is too thin to another day…

If we use a tricky colour filter written by Jon Grove (more on it here), we can make a passable attempt at removing the green splodges: and if we then bump up the contrast to make everything a little clearer, we can get a revised image of f1r:-


Red areas: these form the first four paragraphs of the text. These often start with one of four large vertical characters (known as “gallows characters”), and appear to have been written from top-left down to bottom-right, as you would English, French, Latin etc.

Blue areas: these are known as “titles”, and are typically right-aligned words or short phrases added to the end of paragraphs. It has been proposed that the text contained in these might actually be section titles (which seems fairly reasonable). There’s a brief discussion on this by (a differently spelled!) John Grove here, who first suggested the term.

Yellow area: this is a cipher key arranged vertically down the right hand side of the page that someone has written in (and only partially filled before giving up) in a 16th century hand. Though a bit indistinct, you can still make out “a b c d e” at the top left and a few other letters besides.

Bright green areas: these odd shapes appear nowhere else, and are generally referred to as “weirdoes” (for want of a better name). Interestingly, these are picked out in bright red: f67r2 is the only other place with red text that I can think of (the page that was originally on the front of what is now Quire 9).

Dull green area: this is where the earliest proven owner wrote his signature (something like “Jacobus de Tepenecz, Prag”, though it is very hard to make out), which a subsequent owner appears to have (quite literally) scrubbed off the page (if you look carefully, you can see what appears to be two or more watermarks at the edges of the area). The question of why someone would want to do this is a matter for another day…

Pink area: hidden in the top right corner next to some wormholes and the folio number (“1”, in a sixteenth century hand) is a very faint picture, possibly of a bird. Surprisingly, this subtle piece of marginalia doesn’t appear in GC’s otherwise-very-good gallery of Voynich marginalia: so here’s an enhanced picture of it so you can see what I’m talking about:-.

So, even if we can’t yet read f1r’s text, can we navigate its layout? I believe we can! From the presence of red text, I’m fairly certain it was the first page of a quire: and from the signature and weathering, I don’t see any reason to think this was ever bound anywhere apart from at the front of the manuscript. This leads me to predict that the set of four paragraphs forms an index to the manuscript as a whole, and so very probably describe four separate “books” or “works”, where the “title” (appended to the end of the paragraph) is indeed the title of that book.

If you were looking for cribs to crack the titles 🙂 , my best guess is that the first book (section) is a herbal, the second book is on the stars (astronomy and astrology), the third book is on water, while the fourth book comprises recipes and secrets. I also suspect that this index page was composed about three-quarters of the way through the project, and that the (really quite strange) Herbal-B pages were added in a subsequent phase. But, once again, that’s another story entirely…

Thorndike on the Voynich Manuscript!

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I’ve often wondered what Lynn Thorndike thought of the Voynich Manuscript: after all, he (his first name came from the town of Lynn, Massachusetts) lived from 1882 to 1965, and continued to publish long after his retirement in 1950, and so was active before, during and after the 1920s when Wilfrid Voynich’s cipher manuscript mania/hype was at its peak. As a well-known writer on alchemy, magic and science, my guess is that Thorndike would surely have been one of those distinguished American academics and historians whom Voynich tried so hard to court after his move from Europe to New York.

One of my ongoing projects is to work my way through all of Thorndike’s works, as it seems to me that his science/magic research programme carved a trail through the jungle of mostly-unread proto-scientific manuscripts that probably falls close to where the Voynich Manuscript is situated: and few historians since him have felt any pressing need to build on his work except in generally quite specific ways. All of which is why I happened to be reading Chapter VII “Nicholas of Cusa and the Triple Motion of the Earth” in Thorndike’s “Science & Thought in the Fifteenth Century” (1929).

Firstly, you need to understand that Thorndike thought that the whole Burckhardtian notion of the (supposedly fabulous and extraordinary) Renaissance was plain ridiculous: there were countless examples of ingenuity, invention, and insight throughout the Middle Ages (and, indeed, throughout all history) to be found, if you just bothered to take the time and effort to place events and writings within their own context.

Furthermore, Thorndike believed that lazy historians, having set up this false opposition between (high) Renaissance culture and (low) medieval scholasticism, then went looking for exceptional individuals who somehow bucked that trend, “forerunners, predictors, or martyrs of the glorious age of modern science that was to come.” (p.133) The list of usual suspects Thorndike suggests – “Roger Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Peurbach and Regiomontanus, Leonardo da Vinci” – appears to me not far from how the fake table of Priory of Sion Grand Masters would have looked, if Pierre Plantard been a tad more receptive to non-French history.

Of course, Thorndike – being Thorndike – then goes on to demonstrate precisely how the whole myth around Nicholas of Cusa arose: basically, German historians looking out for a German ‘forerunner, predictor, or martyr‘ plucked three marginal fragments from Nicholas’s work and wove them together to tell a story that was, frankly, not there to be told. Then you can almost feel the fever rising in Thorndike’s genuinely angry brow when he continues:

“Could anything, even the most childish of medieval superstitions, be more unscientific, unhistorical, and lacking in common sense than this absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation, by modern investigators and historians of science?” (p.137)

Punchy (and grouchy) stuff: but he’s far from finished yet. He has an example of something even more scandalous which he feels compelled to share with us:-

“When are we ever going to come out of it? To stop approaching the study of medieval science by such occult methods as the scrutiny of a manuscript supposed to have been written by Roger Bacon in cipher, instead of by reading the numerous scientific manuscripts that are expressed in straightforward and coherent, albeit somewhat abbreviated, Latin?” (p.137)

So there you have it. In 1929, while Wilfrid Voynich was still alive, Thorndike took a measured look at Voynich’s and Newbold’s “Roger Bacon Manuscript” nonsense, and placed it straight in the category of “absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation“.

John Manly may have been more dismissive of Newboldian cryptography in his article in Speculum 6 (July 1931), but Thorndike was no less dismissive of Newboldian history in print in 1929. Just so you know!

Enigmatic Instrument…

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Here’s a nice bit of craft by someone called “iisaw” (Eric Coyote Elliott), who’s made a fabulous astrolabe-like instrument and posted a couple of pictures of it on the DeviantArt website – click on the picture there for a detailed view.

enigmatic_instrument_by_iisaw_mini

As you should be able to see, Eric used Voynich lettering (probably the EVA font) when etching enigmatic script on his enigmatic instrument. He writes:-

This “Cosmolabe” is a prop for a movie. The fifteen circular symbols on the front represent different worlds and the signs on the outer rim are components of magical runes used to travel between the worlds. The instument itself is a way to calculate which runes need to be used for opening gates between specific places.

Cool! What’s also nice is the way that it mirrors many of the circular diagrams in Quire 9. As to the text, I can see “qoksheedy” (which only appears on f108v) there, though the phrase it is in does not: so it looks to me like he’s done a nice job of simulating Voynichese, possibly even better than Gordon Rugg’s grilles ever did. 🙂

Perpetual Lamps…

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At last, my copy of Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume’s “Perpetual Motion: The history of an obsession” (which I mentioned here) has arrived, though I must admit to a certain amount of disappointment that its chapter 15 (“Perpetual Lamps“) only runs from page 194 to page 199. All the same, if that is all we have, then let us pick up that baton and run with it…

Ord-Hume discusses Fortunio Liceti’s “De Lunae Subobscura Luce prope coniunctiones“, which turns out (I think) to be Chapter 50 (L) of his 1640 book “Litheosphorus“: there’s an online scan at the Wolfenbütteler Digitale Bibliothek here, though (once again) it turns out to be only some six pages long.

Though Ord-Hume mentions various bits from Della Porta, his main source seems to be the section in Bishop John Wilkins’ 1648 “Mathematicall Magick, or The wonders that may be performed by Mechanical geometry” entitled “Subterraneous lamps, diverse historicall relations concerning thsir duration for many hundred years together“.

I’d heard of the book before: it merits a mention on p.309 of William Eamon’s enjoyable “Science and the Secrets of Nature” (1994), who notes both that it used the word “Magick” in an ironic sense, because “vulgar opinion… doth commonly attribute all such [machines and devices] unto the power of Magick“, and that Isaac Newton was an “avid reader” of it [as was Christopher Wren]. Also on my bookshelf is “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited” (1999), where Paul Bembridge (in his article “Rosicrucian Resurgence at the court of Cromwell“) briefly namechecks Wilkins’ mention of the eternal lamp allegedly in the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz. (It’s in Yates too, of course).

[Incidentally, because Curse readers will remember my discussion of early modern wind-powered cars, I should say that Wilkins also talks about Simon Stevin’s wind-wagon, and even includes a rather faked-up line drawing of it (you can see a copy of it here).]

Yes, I’d love to buy a proper copy of Wilkins’ book, but… a first edition apparently went at auction earlier this year for £1000: oh, and there’s a copy at B & L Rootenberg up for $3500. OK, the dollar’s weak, but it’s not that weak, right?

Thankfully, Kessinger Publishing sell (for rather less cash) a print-on-demand reproduction which you can buy through Amazon etc: but note that (rather unhelpfully) they’ve modernised the spelling of the title to “Mathematical Magic“. Anyhow, I’ve ordered a copy, and will post a blog entry about it when it arrives…

Review of "Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone"…

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No, not the 2008 film (though that too has a crystal skull-based storyline): I’m talking about the 1995 book by Max McCoy, which Bantam have just (May 2008) reissued apropos of nothing (apart from perhaps trying to surf the wave of the film’s gigantic marketing spend?)

The Voynich Manuscript makes its appearance very early on (p.27, actually the first page of Chapter 1): McCoy manages to present its history very lightly and not bog the reader down in too many details. But as the book is set in 1933, there wasn’t a whole UFO angle to cover (or other such modern confections). Instead, you get a little bit of Newbold, Bacon, alchemy, Major John M. Manly (!!!), John Dee, Kelley, the Shew Stone, and even a quick reference to Wilfrid Voynich in New York: basically, everything moves briskly along in the kind of proper screenplay-like way you’d hope from an Indy novel. Yes, there’s even the occasional snake (for readers playing Indy buzzword bingo, I guess).

I’ll admit it: I was charmed by the book. It’s small (293 pocket-size pages), no larger than you’d imagine a Japanese commuter squeezing into a pocket, and reads so quickly that at some points (most notably in the end sequence past the oasis) I deliberately closed my eyes to slow the pace down so that I could properly picture the scene in my mind.

Historically, the book has a deliciously light touch throughout, in particular when Indy and his companion are improbably rescued by an elderly French couple called Nicholas and Peronelle (p.200) – and if you can’t work out who they are by that stage in the story, you very possibly deserve to be shot.

I liked all the atlantici history and the Shelta Thari stuff (there’s a Wikipedia page too) woven in: but note that when McCoy writes “Nus a dhabjan dhuilsa“, he probably means “Nus a dhabjon dhuilsha” [‘The blessing of God on you’], though I’d prefer not to pick a fight with a tinker / tinsmith as to which one is correct. Incidentally, my guess is that McCoy picked up the reference to Thari from Roger Zelazny’s 10-book ‘Amber’ series.

Inevitably, there are some historical mistakes in the book (the VMs wasn’t in Yale in 1933, I’m pretty sure that the British Museum had a positive rotograph of at least some of the VMs in 1929, etc), but frankly I couldn’t care less. It’s a delightful, frothy, whip-cracking romp through alchemical history, that I think should be required reading for any modern Voynich novelist.